Times Garden Editor Bob Smaus reveals secrets for creating a garden that just keeps on growing, despite drought, freezes, occasional rains and setbacks

Frequently I mention my garden in my stories. Too frequently, it appears. Now the editor of this section, and a few readers, want to see what he calls “the garden editor’s garden.”

This is like asking a sports writer about his golf game, and a few years back I would have ducked the assignment, but the garden has finally come into its own and it no longer takes much coaxing to get me to show it off.

The garden looks best right about now. There are bulbs that bloom earlier and some perennials wait until late summer or fall to flower, but from April to the middle of June, it is a blaze of color.

The garden, in the back yard, is primarily a flower garden. There is a peach tree right in the middle and the necessary lemon, and we grow some vegetables and herbs here and there among the flowers, but my wife and I like flowers, so the garden is chock-full of them.

My last garden was on a hillside in Pacific Palisades and I grew California natives and other Mediterranean plants. When we moved closer into town (into West Los Angeles), we decided we needed a lusher garden to help offset the noise of airplanes overhead and a busy mall right behind.

Actually, we first tried to grow Mediterranean things like rockroses and ceanothus and they grew just fine for a few years, but they really don’t like level lots and most died.

That’s right, the garden editor can kill plants just like anyone else.

In fact, I killed some real beauties--a gorgeous Acacia pendula that looked like a gray-leaved weeping willow, a California lilac or two, a spectacular rockrose ( Cistus skanbergii for those taking notes) that was a mass of pink blossoms in spring. This last casualty had grown to eight feet across and left a huge hole in the garden when it passed.

So, about four years ago, we redid the entire garden.

We decided that since we actually had a very good soil--good enough to grow anything--and because our house was kind of small and cute, we would plant an old-fashioned flower garden like my grandfather would have grown. (My grandfather grew prize-winning begonias, fuchsias and delphiniums. I have a box full of ribbons he won at various flower shows.)

Our timing wasn’t too good. The last garden needed practically no water at all. This one needs regular watering. Of course, there was no need to save water when we had a garden that didn’t need any. Now we have a drought and a garden that needs regular irrigation.

We are not talking about 5,000 gallons a day here, but we do average about 600. We’ve managed to cut that to about 480 gallons a day, but we still use the most water on the block. I know because I had the temerity to call the Department of Water and Power a couple years back and ask.

We also have three teen-agers who can spend most of the morning in a shower, so I’m not sure how much of the water goes to showers and how much to the garden.

I keep intending to install drip irrigation, but at the moment we water the garden by moving a little $1.95 circular sprinkler around the garden on the end of a hose. This actually works rather well because we can water different areas for different lengths of time.

For instance, the delphiniums and roses need a lot, the lemon needs less, the shrubs and trees that make the background for the flower beds need very little, and so on. We can give every plant the water it requires.

One of the things we did four years ago was to simplify the background. We covered up several neighbors’ fences (white painted wood, concrete block, stucco) with a plain wood board fence. We covered our neighbor’s garage with wood lattice and then planted vines on the fences and lattice. The stucco walls of the house disappeared under Boston ivy.

In front of all these fences and walls, we planted plain, dark green shrubs, such as Texas privet and Carolina laurel cherry (Prunus caroliniana ).

What we created was a simple dark background for the flowers, against which they seem to glow, like jewels on black satin.

We even planted a lawn, but kept it very small to leave room for all of the shrubs and flowers. It is one of the tall, turf-type fescues that needs watering (in our part of town) only once a week and it is only 8 feet wide by 30 feet long--just big enough for a game of catch.

This left us enough room for some really big flower beds. The one with the delphiniums is 13 feet deep. They’re a little hard to get into, but they let us do some staging with the flowers, putting tall flowers in back of short, with room left over for roses and the background shrubs.

In these big beds, we thoroughly prepared the soil, which was already a fine sandy loam, by adding quantities of organic amendments and fertilizer. And then we planted flowers. Lots of flowers.

In the photographs you can see some of our favorites. The tall blue spires are Pacific Coast delphiniums, mostly the Bluebird and Black Knight strains, which are dark blue with a white “bee,” and dark purple, respectively. We also plant a mauve or two and a few whites.

We move this planting every year, having discovered that delphiniums like a new spot in the garden each season. Into every planting hole we add a water-holding polymer and some slow-release fertilizer. These are thirsty, greedy plants, but very rewarding.

They grow in full sun and, right behind them in partial shade, we grow foxgloves, which have similar flower spikes. These two plants account for a lot of the drama in the garden.

In front of the delphiniums we grow a multitude of smaller flowers, most of which are perennials.

There are pink perennial poppies (a special California-bred strain named Minicaps), low-growing pink prickly phlox, pink dianthus (our favorite is named ‘Penny’), and pink and purple alstroemerias.

There are also the smaller spikes of lavender campanulas and deep blue bearded iris. Gray lamb’s ears and lychnis add a little contrast in the front row.

Here and there are roses. Our current favorite is one of the Austin roses named ‘Lordly Oberon’ with obese lavender-pink buds and blossoms.

Another favorite we found in my grandmother’s garden. My mother remembered a gigantic pink rose from her childhood. On the chance it was still growing there, we paid a visit to the new owners of the old Victorian house in Palo Alto, and found it--a many-petaled cabbage rose of incredible fragrance and form, a real find.

The garden is mostly shades of pink and blue in spring, though there are touches of yellow, including a dainty but very pretty native perennial buttercup growing near the iris.

As summer progresses, more and more yellow and gold flowers bloom, so the garden warms up with the weather. There is a giant Midwestern sunflower (Helianthus maximiliani ), Mexican tarragon (Tagetes lucida ) and several golden yarrows of various heights.

In autumn, the background explodes with Japanese anemones. We grow several kinds, including a big single pink, a nice white and a double deep purple. Gayfeather and physostegia also bloom then, in purple and white.

We also do all of our planting in the fall, to take advantage of the cooler weather and, hopefully, the winter rains. In winter, the garden looks quite dormant and we cut back the roses and perennials and prune the peach, but by February, the bulbs are blooming and the garden is off and running again.

Visitors usually ask how much time the garden requires and the truth is it needs very little. Of course, that’s not counting the initial preparation of the soil. We spend a lot of time and effort on the soil.

Generally, however, we probably spend a couple of hours each week and most of that time is spent moving the little sprinkler around the garden. We water about once a week when things are growing and blooming.

Weeding takes some time, but we weed one part of the garden while we water the other. Both my wife and I like weeding so it’s time peacefully spent close to the flowers.

Always in March, and perhaps two or three times later on, we fertilize by simply scattering a granular fertilizer everywhere, watering it in with the sprinkler.

We have virtually no pest problems and wouldn’t spray if we did because of the vegetables and herbs mixed in with the flowers. The great variety of plants helps account for the lack of pests because there are always predatory insects on some nearby plant.

Aphids are just about the only pest, and only on the roses, and only in spring. We just rub them off.

Snails used to be a serious pest, but since the possums started visiting our garden (attracted by the cats’ food), they are gone. Possums eat them shell and all and you can hear the crunching sound at night, music (if somewhat macabre music) to a gardener’s ear.

The photographs were taken during the previous two springs and each year the garden is different. I am always trying new plants, so much of the garden gets replanted every fall.

This year, the delphiniums are in front of a handsome new burgundy abutilon named ‘Nabob,’ there are several new Austin roses on trial, a very pretty new perennial phlox, spikes of Rehmania elata and the new ‘Palace Purple’ coral bell, which has burgundy leaves. I’m sure you’ll hear more about these in future columns.

The garden looks good again this year, thanks to all that March rain, but this summer I am going to have to let some of it go, and this coming fall I will probably plant parts of the garden with more drought-resistant shrubs and perennials, just in case the rains don’t return next year.

I might even get around to putting in that drip irrigation system.